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FreeBSD 5.3 Released

Posted by michael on from the only-mostly-dead dept.

cpugeniusmv writes "FreeBSD 5.3 has been released! This release marks a milestone in the FreeBSD 5.x series and the beginning of the 5-STABLE branch of releases. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the release notes and errata list. Bittorrent Download."

33 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. *BSD is dying, et al... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let's take a cue from Groklaw -- all posts about *BSD dying, Netcraft, and similar predictions under this thread, please.

    1. Re:*BSD is dying, et al... by ulib · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Anything good they come up with will just be copied and made better in all the other operating systems.

      Uh.. yeah. Aren't you happy with it? That's pretty much the BSD spirit: academical, not political.
      Anyway, since you insist, there are some OS's that *should* get better at copying:
      About FreeBSD's Network Stack
      Quote:"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps." ;)

      And since there have been cases where GPL programmers *stole* BSD code (here), let me add that the BSD code is *not* public domain. So, even who "copies" it, must give proper credits to the author (here's the BSD license, for reference).


      --
      Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

  2. FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's pretty ancient.
    I know, it's a mistake. 3.4.3, or 3.4.2?

    Anyway, FreeBSD rules. I'm glad they waited to make 5.3 great.

    1. Re:FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2? by docbrazen · · Score: 5, Informative

      Ya, it's 3.4.2. GNU GCC has been updated from 3.3.3-prerelease as of 6 November 2003 to 3.4.2-prerelease as of 28 July 2004. -http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/relnotes-i38 6.html#NEW The release notes say the same thing for the other platforms as well.

    2. Re:FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2? by shlong · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yes, it's 3.4.2. While 3.4.3 was recently announced by the FSF, there certainly wasn't time to get it tested and properly integrated into 5.3. Anyways, it's one of a couple of typos in the announcement that I fixed in later emails.

      --
      Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
  3. Excellent OS by Ambient_Developer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    BSD is an excellent operating system if your trying to lock down a network, or some other coperate enviroment.. Just look at their history with security, which is pretty convincing. So I say kudos to milestone release 5.3, I know I will be trying it. ~matt

    1. Re:Excellent OS by setagllib · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, as far as everyone who knows is concerned, no even hardened Linux has ever competed against any BSD in security. It's just impossible with Linux' development model, and the services in userland (as opposed to the mature services that the BSDs have kept for decades and hardened) are often dirty hacks that haven't had proper auditing, if indeed any.

      But if you want security, go OpenBSD, it's the world leader. A close second is NetBSD, which right now is much faster and more stable than FreeBSD 5 (even in many SMP cases, too). FreeBSD is okay for many users but it has slowed down tremendously, lost a lot of cleanliness too. It's a shame to see such a great system degenerate, but it happened.

      In my opinion, NetBSD is a good half-way between Linux and OpenBSD. It has a lot of Linux-like performance (sometimes better, sometimes worse) and design, but security isn't far behind OpenBSD in practice. It doesn't have anywhere near as many randomization-of-kernel-data features though, which you might find handy. You can still use cgd for any storage including swap, if you're really paranoid :)

      --
      Sam ty sig.
    2. Re:Excellent OS by HenryKoren · · Score: 5, Insightful
      FreeBSD is okay for many users but it has slowed down tremendously, lost a lot of cleanliness too
      Regretfully admitting that FreeBSD 5.3 is crap

      You my friend, are a Troll. As an avid user of FreeBSD 4,5, 4.10, 5.1, 5.2.1, and now 5.3RC2, I can personally guarantee that you have no fucking Idea what you are talking about. Lost cleanliness, my ass! The improvements in 5.3 are awesome. The integration of BIND 9 into the base inside a chroot jail is excellent. The separation of Perl from the base also helped to clean it up. The user experience is awesome in 5.3... My Ghz athlon server has 500+ ports installed, every service you could imagine, and runs X.org with OpenGL flawlessly. I notice a distinct increase in performance and functionality after CVSUPing from 5.2.1 to 5.3 RC2. With a streamlined kernel and good old SCHED_4BSD what exactly is so "unclean"? Have you had a personal experience with 5.3 or are you just spouting mindless zealotry? Why are you on a personal quest for schism in the BSD community?

      Calling anything so massively successful "crap" is just pure ignorance. Are Linux and Windows, or anything that's not NetBSD also crap? Please share.... The /. mods obviously can't get enough of your idiotic pontification.

      --
      To blog is sublime
    3. Re:Excellent OS by setagllib · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Desktop is okay. The same software runs (I'm posting from Firefox 1.0 RC1 on a NetBSD 2.0RC4 machine I set up a couple of days ago) and it runs just as well. Responsiveness is very good in all but the highest of high load, in which case your audio might skip for a second or two (but this happens with any OS under enough disk load, and can be prevented by buffering the whole MP3 or whatever into RAM :P).

      But as for hardware support, what most consider the defining point of desktop use, it's great. All hardware it does support, it supports basically to full capacity, and the range is good. Right now you'll want standard hardware though, because the NVidia driver is not officially ported (there's an unofficial port I'll have to try) and the xorg one is flaky (but I'm using it now), and there is no NDIS wrapper so standard network cards are your best choice (i.e. nForce networking might not be an option). Fetch a good Realtek and you're set for life. Sound is good, doesn't do software mixing like FreeBSD nor hardware mixing (for most at lesat) like ALSA, but quality is good.

      It has good server applications too, not only because it can run on server-centric architectures really well, but more because it is very solid, secure and good at handling load (haven't tried under ultra-high load, but it survived a thrasing from stress(1)). This doesn't affect you since you since you're after desktop, but it's nice to know that it can scale up.

      Worth a try, installs quickly, easy to manage and all... not like it'll take a long time or a lot of effort :)

      --
      Sam ty sig.
  4. A few questions... by KillerHamster · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been running FreeBSD on a couple servers for a while, and with this latest release, I've been thinking about trying it on a desktop. The particular computer I have in mind is currently running Slackware 10. I have a few questions for those of you using FreeBSD on a desktop system:

    Why do you prefer it over other Unix-like OS's?
    Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?
    Have you had difficulty finding applications that will run on it?
    In general, will software written for Linux compile and run on FreeBSD without too much difficulty?

    1. Re:A few questions... by bcrowell · · Score: 3, Informative
      Why do you prefer it over other Unix-like OS's?
      I mainly like it for the ports system. The only things I know of that can compare with it would be Debian's apt-get and Gentoo's portage. However, I was never able to get a Debian or Gentoo system to install. YMMV :-)

      Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?
      I tried to get USB to work in 4.x, and failed, but USB support is supposed to be much better in 5.x. Audio has worked fine for me.

      Have you had difficulty finding applications that will run on it?
      That's the best thing about it: the ports system.

      In general, will software written for Linux compile and run on FreeBSD without too much difficulty?
      Well, first check if it's in the ports system. If it's well-known software, it probably is, so you're all set. Otherwise, it really depends on the software. If it's small and simple, and wasn't written with lots of Linuxisms, then it should be no problem. If it's 10^7 lines of code, and was written by people who assumed it would only be used on Linux, then you may have a long, hard road ahead.

      --
      Find free books.
    2. Re:A few questions... by molnarcs · · Score: 4, Informative
      If you like slack you will love FreeBSD (and this is true vice versa - most FreeBSD users prefer Slackware to any other distro). To me, it is easier to configure/maintain (thanks to its excellent documentation: the man pages - better than gnu man pages usually, /usr/share/examples, the handbook of course, the faq, and the very friendly community at bsdforums.org).

      Software: most software written for linux would compile without much change on FreeBSD. In fact, that's how the ports system work. Check out freshports to see if your favourite app is included or not. You can also have binary packages, which can be installed similarly to debian packages (pkg_add -r blah is ~ apt-get install blah). If you put linux_enable="YES" into your rc.conf, you'll have linux 'emulation.' Don't worry, it's not really an emulation, linux-apps run with native speed on FreeBSD. Really. (you can try it yourself if you don't believe me, for sometimes there exists both a native freebsd and a linux version of the same program). Finding an app is as simple as cding into /usr/ports and typing "make search name=[progname]" if you know the name of the application you need or "make search key=[whatever]" to search in the short descriptions of each port. Installing that app is as simple as entering it's directory, and typing make install clean (or if you have portupgrade tool installed, you can simply say: portinstall mplayer. Details in the handbook :)

      I also have slack on my puter btw (with kernel 2.6.7), and now that ULE is turned off, slack seems to be slightly faster on the desktop (KDE on both), but only if the system is heavily loaded. I think, even for someone who is new to FreeBSD, tracking -STABLE (look up what that means in the handbook is pretty safe, and hopefully they will reenable the new ULE constant time scheduler (whatever that means, I just read this fancy description on OSNEWS :o)) soon.

      Hardware compatibility: FreeBSD supports standard pc hardware. There are accelerated binary native nvidia drivers for freebsd. USB support is excellent (my USB mouse worked out of the box, just read the installation messages carefully - you have to say no to mouse configuration if you have an usb mouse) ... except for USB 2.0. So USB 2.0 devices work in 1.1 compatibility mode. Discussion, however, is already started for fixing USB 2.0 support (EHCI driver), and I'm sure it will be ready soon. I also have a tv card (PlayTV MPEG2, an el cheapo card) which works nicely under FreeBSD and with mencoder (and FreeBSD's own native tv app, fxtv). In fact, I have much clearer picture than on windows, thanks to better filters in mplayer I think. This is the command I use to get the best quality btw:

      mplayer tv:// -tv input=1:driver=bsdbt848:norm=palbg:audioid=2 \
      -vf pp=hb/vb/dr/al/lb,hqdn3d -stop-xscreensaver
  5. Re:The torrent link is not working by cpugeniusmv · · Score: 5, Informative

    Torrent Mirror

  6. FreeBSD on Compaqs by Black+Acid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Recent Compaq/HP laptop users can't run FreeBSD. This problem has been known since July and still not fixed in this release. FreeBSD 5.3 (all betas, RCs, and the release itself), 5.2, 5.1, 5.0, all versions of FreeBSD 4 and 3 cannot run on Compaq Presario R3000Z and similar laptops, in either i386 or AMD64 mode. When is this going to be fixed? How come the patch exists.... works perfectly.... and isn't being commited?

    --
    Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
  7. Re:Doesn't Matter by mkro · · Score: 5, Funny
    In five years, either FreeBSD will have adopted DragonflyBSD's model, or nobody will be using FreeBSD.
    Matt? Is that you?
    --
    I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
  8. Re:great news! by cperciva · · Score: 4, Informative

    The announcement should be up there by now, but it was delayed slightly because nobody knew how to start a rebuild (outside of the usual fixed schedule) of the web site.

    --
    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  9. FreeBSD 5.0 for Alpha? by cyberkahn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, amd64, and ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using bootable media or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for all architectures are available now."

    I thought they were going to relegate Alpha to Tier 2, but I see ISO images on the servers? Thank you FreeBSD team!!!!!

  10. Re:Future FreeBSD releases by mtrisk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It is also important to consider the injustices of slashdot's editors. This topic can be researched more on anti-slash [anti-slash.org] Is this a clever troll? Why in the world would *BSD developers mention anti-slash?

    --

    Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
  11. Try out FreeBSD on a live CD by cquark · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you aren't ready to install FreeBSD on your hard disk, you can try out FreeBSD 5 with the live FreeSBIE CD. It's currently based on FreeBSD 5.2.1.

  12. Re:upgrade 4.10 to 5.3 stable by Bodhammer · · Score: 5, Informative
    1) read /usr/src/UPDATING

    2) read http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/current-stable.html

    3) and this: http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/FreeBSD53. html

    --
    "I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
  13. Ever since I fell from "Sun God" by YetAnotherName · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From 1988 to 1993 I was a "Sun God," meaning I adminisrated a university's computer lab and network of mostly SunOS (680x0 & SPARC) 4.0 systems, all based on BSD. Root access, god-like powers, you get the drift. About this time, Linux was just a posting in a newsgroup.

    After leaving the university environment and getting a real job, I wanted to re-live the Sun environment at home, but goodness, were Sun systems ever pricy. Linux looked like a viable alternative, but FreeBSD had just released 2.0 at the time.

    I went with FreeBSD.

    It was a pretty easy decision: FreeBSD was the more Sun-like of the two PC Unix-like systems. Specifically, Linux used the System V style of runlevels, and Sun had jaded me against System V ever since they stopped bundling the compiler and called their OS "Solaris."

    That was awhile back. Today, I've got rackmount hardware at home running a variety of operating systems. I get most of my stuff done on Linux. But FreeBSD has run, now runs, and will most likely continue to run my firewall and NAT. It doesn't do much else; but what it does, it does with efficiency and grace.

    Cheers, Chuckie.

  14. Slackware junkies should give BSD a try.. by SnowCrashed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I gave BSD a try for the first time a couple months ago, and as an intermediate Linux user who favors Slackware, I felt right at home with FreeBSD 4.9. I would definitely recommend anyone who is a *nix junkie to give it a try, you might be pleasantly suprised. I know that BSD typically isn't as good with compatibility as Linux, but I haven't had any issues. Long live BSD

  15. Re:Future FreeBSD releases by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's the un-edited email:

    http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/ cu rrent/2004-11/0446.html

    You'll notice an extra sentence in the above post that doesn't seem to belong.. Rather hypocritical attacking post editing with post editing - maybe they need to look down and see what shoe's on their foot?

  16. Re:been a while by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny
    okay...

    #define BROKE 1
    this of course, is not GNU/Broke, because if it was it could also read email.
  17. Crazy period?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    My teacher was right. The world collapsed the moment the Rex Sox Won.

    Look at everything that's happening since.
    - New releases of *BSD variants.
    - Bush re-elected
    - /. robot topics scaring the shit outta us
    - Half life 2 released in about a week.

    What next? Flying pigs? (Name that Simpson episode!)

  18. Re:Dead? by RLiegh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For those of you who, like me, cannot afford vmware, might I suggest qemu?

  19. Re:Upgrading from RC2? by drmerope · · Score: 5, Informative

    Best approach is to upgrade via source.

    pkg_add -r cvsup-without-gui
    edit the example cvsup file:
    so that:
    *default release=cvs tag=.
    becomes
    *default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_3

    Then, do the following (quoted from /usr/src/UPDATING, slightly abridged because this is will be a small upgrade):
    make buildworld
    make buildkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE
    make installkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE

    make installworld

    You can omit the KERNCONF business if you just want to use the GENERIC kernel.

  20. Re:In Other News by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Surprised me too. It's clearly a made-up story. Pot smokers would never get into fistfights.

  21. Re:Off Topic Slightly by user32.ExitWindowsEx · · Score: 3, Informative

    wait... only *NetBSD* changed logos. FreeBSD is still Lassiter's "Beastie" (yes, John Lassiter of Pixar fame designed "Beastie")

    --
    "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
  22. Re:Upgrading from RC2? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The FreeBSD handbook on htp://www.freebsd.org/ is excellent. It walks you through the steps to do a binary upgrade, or a source upgrade of your OS. Personaly, the way I find easiest is to just drop in the install CD, run sysinstall, and choose "upgrade". I always have a current CD anyways, so I don't mind burning a copy of the release when it comes out. Cheers.

  23. Trolltalk is trolltalk, facts are facts. :) by ulib · · Score: 3, Informative
    FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project
    Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD
    "FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."

    --
    Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

  24. NetBSD faster than FreeBSD??? by Phatmanotoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A close second is NetBSD, which right now is much faster and more stable than FreeBSD 5 (even in many SMP cases, too). FreeBSD is okay for many users but it has slowed down tremendously, lost a lot of cleanliness too. It's a shame to see such a great system degenerate, but it happened.

    Traditional folklore said OpenBSD is focused on security, NetBSD on portability, and FreeBSD on performance (on x86). How can NetBSD be faster than FreeBSD now? Heck, if NetBSD is about correctness and portability, and on top of that they manage to beat FreeBSD in terms of speed, then there's something really really wrong with FreeBSD.

    So I guess my real question is, is it really true that NetBSD is surpassing FreeBSD at heir own game?

    1. Re:NetBSD faster than FreeBSD??? by Eivind+Eklund · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I'm a FreeBSD developer.

      The issue the grandparent is alluding to is that we've had some performance hits in early 5.x versions compared to our own 4.x branch. This is due to introducing a wider SMP model, and the necessity for locks for this. However, this is infrastructure for a overall speedup, and we are continually moving more of the code over to the higher performance model.

      As far as I know (from what numbers I have seen), we're still faster than NetBSD overall in 5.x, but not in all subcases.

      Apart from that, the folklore is a simplification. FreeBSD has several platforms, and we have generally had good performance, but it isn't a really specific focus. It's just something we are good at (compared to the other BSDs, and in many cases compared to Linux). We're also good at general support of software (there are over 11,000 packages for FreeBSD), documentation, etc.

      FreeBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD has taken a number of different routes for optimization lately. It is not clear which of these will lead to be the best performance over time; it may be that FreeBSD will keep a lead, or it may be that one of the others will overtake us. Speed is a game everybody plays.

      Eivind.

      --
      Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.